FX Experience Has Gone Read-Only

I've been maintaining FX Experience for a really long time now, and I love hearing from people who enjoy my weekly links roundup. One thing I've noticed recently is that maintaining two sites (FX Experience and JonathanGiles.net) takes more time than ideal, and splits the audience up. Therefore, FX Experience will become read-only for new blog posts, but weekly posts will continue to be published on JonathanGiles.net. If you follow @FXExperience on Twitter, I suggest you also follow @JonathanGiles. This is not the end - just a consolidation of my online presence to make my life a little easier!

tl;dr: Follow me on Twitter and check for the latest news on JonathanGiles.net.

We just finished our talk here at Devoxx called “Gaming JavaFX”. The talk was scheduled for Friday morning and we wanted to do something really fun and a bit lighthearted, but also really practical. Earlier this week James Gosling had a talk about the Java Store, and we wanted to provide some momentum to the idea that you can write really fun and interesting games in JavaFX and then load these up into the store.

Jasper posted a preview teaser earlier in the week of our Dude with a bomb. You’ll appreciate watching the talk at Parley’s when they have it posted (or you can pay Parley’s a few quid and see the talk even earlier).

Dueling Sketch

The game we wrote is called “Dueling Dudes”. Its a non-scrolling side shooter, not unlike some other popular games like Scorched Earth or iShoot. Except we decided to replace the tanks and earth with dudes and boxes. We placed it in a warehouse and gave each box & barrel physical properties, and gave our dudes weapons and the ability to bash the terrain around. It was tremendous fun. I once read that every programmer should write a game at least once a year just for fun and to keep that youthful exuberance. I couldn’t agree more.

Technically it was a very pleasant and fun thing to work on as well. Integrating the physics engine was not very much work, and using a scenegraph to model things was very natural. We drove things mostly from the engine and a few well placed binds and a single Timeline which drove the world. Jasper pretty well wrote the whole thing over 3 days. Here was our secret equation for success:

Equation For Success

We’ve hosted the game here at FXExperience, hope you enjoy playing it (and if you have troubles on your machine configuration we’d like to know that too!).

DuelingDudes

Click To Play